← All use cases
The scenario
In your company a “run” is a manufacturing batch, not a jog. “Churn” means
something precise with a formula behind it. “The platform” is one specific
system, not a metaphor.
Default extraction reads your text as general English and stores general
English, which is why recall on domain-heavy corpora feels slightly blunt.
What this recipe shows that no other does: changing how text becomes memory
in the first place, rather than changing how you search it afterwards.
Step 1 — See what a space does today
Step 2 — Add guidance
guidance is additive: it rides alongside the default instructions rather than
replacing them, which makes it the safe knob.
mode trades thoroughness for cost: verbose stores more per chunk, so it
costs more and recalls more.
Step 3 — Replace the guidelines entirely, if you must
custom_prompt replaces the guidelines block rather than adding to it, and only
takes effect with mode="custom". It is powerful and it is how people break
extraction — start with guidance.
Step 4 — Undo
Reset clears the whole surface, not just your guidance. If the space was
created with a file-retrieval strategy, resetting drops that too and every
later upload quietly degrades to default extraction. Prefer writing the fields
you want over resetting.
Evals
Extraction changes are hard to judge by feel, so measure:
- Record twenty representative sentences in a scratch space with defaults.
list_memories and read what was actually stored — this is the step people
skip, and it is the only direct view of extraction’s output.- Apply guidance, record the same twenty into a second space, and compare.
- Check the specific thing you asked for: are batch ids preserved verbatim?
Never tune extraction against the space you care about. Use a scratch space —
settings change future writes only, so an experiment leaves a permanent, mixed
corpus behind.
Guardrails
- Only future writes are affected. Nothing re-extracts what is already
stored; a change to guidance leaves a space with two eras in it.
- Values are not validated, only field names. A typo in
mode is accepted
and then ignored at use time, so the call looks like it worked and changed
nothing. Check with get_extraction_settings.
- More is not better.
verbose on a chatty space produces memories about
pleasantries, which crowd out the ones that matter.
